Wednesday 20 September 2017

Tom Phillips’ opera Irma is nearly fifty years old and at the pre-performance talk on Sunday evening the host, the director and others were still a little squeamish about directly calling it an opera. (It’s anti-opera, it’s a work with operatic elements, the word after all is from the Latin for…) Even after Phillips expanded the work in 2014, adding more overtly musical notation, its allusive fragments remain tantalisingly elusive as an experience. On record, one could hear realisations by Gavin Bryars and AMM, each transforming the work into a pastiche of their own recognisable style and neither fully comfortable with the score’s hedge of limitations against possibilities. Comparing the two recalls the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Over the weekend South London Gallery presented two performances of a new version of the opera, with staging by Netia Jones and music direction by Anton Lukoszevieze, whose ensemble Apartment House played as a string trio with keyboards and percussion. Apartment House have form in making music out of scores better known for their looks than their sounds. In this realisation, with two singers, an actor and chorus, staged with choreography and video projections, the collaged nature of the work, like much of Phillips’ art, came to the fore. In its expanded form, there’s greater liberty to include and omit, but many elements familiar to listeners to either recorded version persist and remain indelible to the work.

Irma has an indulgent quality to it, and this quality is what truly makes it an opera. The romanticism in Phillips’ poetic fragments is overt and spreads from the libretto to musical and stage directions. The Victorian-era source material is redolent with the same atmosphere. This production gratefully accepted the score’s implied invitations to operatic conventions of tragic heroes, idolised heroines, thwarted love, melancholy, intrigue, the ballet. As Grenville, Benjamin O’Mahony was suitably gentlemanly in his anguish, while singers Josephine Stephenson and Elaine Mitchener evoked characters from their contrasting parts as Irma and The Nurse respectively, in roles that might otherwise become ciphers for the expected values of the audience. All coped well with the added demands placed on how they moved in the space during the second half.

The music itself adopted a new guise with each scene, in turn overtly dramatic then austere, ranging across the approaches taken by his contemporaries in the British avant-garde: Scratch Orchestra-like free-form, quietly minimal, affectionately atavistic. Rather like Cage’s operas, the Babel of collage created a type of Ur-Opera more than anti-opera. Elements from outside the score were permitted, with allusions to more pieces by Phillips and other operas. Precisely halfway through, a gunshot rang out and everything so far seen and heard by the audience was repeated, in reverse – a neat reference to another opera’s use of formal constraints to reign in romantic excess.

Casting the opera as a palindrome raises questions about the ephemeral nature of theatrical experience, not to mention the difficulty of getting music like this performed in public. At least the audience will have heard it more than once. It also highlighted the fact that we were only hearing yet one more possible interpretation of Irma and that only a certain amount of material was used. Irma remains elusive, its score suggesting a lost Platonic ideal that cannot be recreated, but at South London Gallery it gained a distinct identity for itself.